Status characteristics: female versus male-lead films
Research from LBS’s Dr Bryan Stroube has found less consensus in the evaluation of films with female as opposed to male leads.
New research from London Business School’s Dr Bryan Stroube and Dr David Waguespack of the University of Maryland has found that there is less consensus in the evaluation of films with female as opposed to male leads.
Stroube and Waguespack discovered that after assessing close to 400m filmgoer ratings for films screened between 1992 to 2018, men were more negative than women about films with female leads.
In an experiment using fictional AI-generated movie plots and a randomised assignment of the lead-actor’s gender, the newly published, ‘Status and consensus: Heterogeneity in audience evaluations of female- versus male-lead films’ (Strategic Management Journal, February 1, 2024), determined that several elements might be driving these results. These included actor and audience sorting, and the treatment effects on audience quality perceptions in terms of what audiences expect from a film and how they perceive the quality of competing offerings.
In the study, the authors asked whether status characteristics, such as gender, correlated to higher variances in evaluations. Stroube and Waguespack theorised that although gender-based status characteristics may be widely held, it is unlikely - even implausible - that they are held universally.
The performance implications of this lack of consensus concerning female versus male leads are reflected in how independent studios have better outcomes at the box office when releasing movies with female, rather than male, leads. This in turn may partially explain observed differences in trends for female-lead casting when comparing more mainstream films with those released by independent film studios.
ChatGPT used in study’s experiment
In order to create fictional movie descriptions, the authors used ChatGPT-4 to generate non-gendered pitches for new movies across 20 genres that were reflected in the study’s data repository, the IMDb online database of information related to films and television series, as well as other forms of creative output.
Each participant in the experiment was asked to evaluate proposals from four different genres, each with a random lead-actor gender and production crew experience level. After participants read each movie proposal, they were asked to assess their anticipated 1–10 rating (‘How do you think you would rate this movie?) and their expected propensity to consume on a 1–10 scale (‘How likely is it that you would watch this movie?’).
The “Barbie snub” – a perspective from LBS’s Bryan Straube
Commenting on the recent news that the film Barbie had been overlooked by the Academy Award nominations for Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, respectively the director and principal actor for the multi-million dollar film that premiered last summer, Dr Stroube said: “The current discussions around Barbie's Oscar nominations, or lack thereof, are consistent with our finding that female-lead films face less consensus in how they are evaluated.”
